


Whole

by frogy



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Best Friends, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-02-26 03:11:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2635856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frogy/pseuds/frogy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sky is clear over the lake and the crisp, fall air feels good in his lungs. He breathes.</p>
<p>"So." That must be the limit to how long Shitty can be quiet.</p>
<p>"It's nice out," Jack says.</p>
<p>"You didn't drag me out here to talk about the weather," Shitty says.</p>
<p>Jack turns away from the lake to look at Shitty. "You're my best friend." Jack's not sure if that's a question.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whole

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd.

"Berger says you were looking for me?" Shitty says popping into Jack's room. "What'd you want?"

"Can you put pants on?"

"Nope."

"Come on."

"I won the right to be pantsless fair and square, brah."

"You mean Lardo won it for you."

"Hey man, we're a team. You don't draw those kind of distinctions in platonic beer pong life partners."

Jack snorts. There's nothing platonic about Shitty's feelings for Lardo. The fact that no else seems to have noticed is as weird as anything. Jack is usually the last person to pick up on things like that. But here Shitty is, literally swooning over Lardo, right onto Jack's bed. Pantsless.

Jack stands abruptly. "Come on, I want to go to the lake."

Shitty sits up. "Seriously? It's like, practically past your bedtime."

"No it's not." He grabs his jacket from the back I his chair and pulls it on.

"Don't even. You go to sleep at 10:30 so you can wake up for extra pre-practice conditioning. Which, for the record, is fucking crazy."

Jack didn't realize anyone knew. Plus, last week he went to that lecture from the history department and didn't get home until almost 11, so whatever. "Well, tonight I want to go to the lake. You can come like that, but I don't think the campus police are going to honor your underage drinking-won right to pantslessness."

"Fuck the police," Shitty says, almost by reflex, then, "I'll put on pants." Shitty gets up and goes across the hall to his room. "Happy now?" He shouts.

"Yes."

Jack lets Shitty ramble on the walk over about classes, hockey, whatever. There are benches and a paved walkway around the lake, but at a pause in chatter Jack leaves the path more traveled and leads them over the dirt and underbrush toward the water. When Jack gets about as far as he thinks he can without getting wet, he sits down. The ground in front of him where he kicks out his feet is muddy.

Shitty sits down next to him, quiet since Jack led them out here. Jack wasn't planning on going to the lake, but he's glad they're out here. The sky is clear over the lake and the crisp, fall air feels good in his lungs. He breathes.

"So." That must be the limit to how long Shitty can be quiet.

"It's nice out."

"You didn't drag me out here to talk about the weather," Shitty says.

Jack turns away from the lake to look at Shitty. "You're my best friend." Jack's not sure if that's a question. If it is, Shitty doesn't answer. He just stares back at Jack.

That's not what Jack was worried about anyway. "What if I wanted to kiss you?"

Shitty seems to think about his words for a minute, but when he speaks he doesn't sound any different. "You are a beautiful man, my friend, but my appreciation is like purely aesthetic. I don't want to sleep with you. So, like, is this really a hypothetical situation, or-"

"But you'd still be my best friend?" Jack cuts off Shitty. This time it's definitely a question.

"Of course," Shitty says, no hesitation. 

Jack lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding and sinks back onto the dirt. The moon is bright in the sky above him while Shitty prattles on.

"You held back my hair while I puked for like 14 hours after Hazeapoloza last year. That's a friend for life. If you drank and had long hair, I would totally return the favor. But like, since you don't, I owe you something else. Something big."

"My last best friend wasn't," Jack says quietly stopping Shitty in his tracks. 

"Was this..." Shitty trails off looking at Jack questioningly

"Before, yeah," Jack says, not meeting Shitty's eyes.

"You know, you can talk to me about it," Shitty says, flopping to lie down next to Jack. 

Jack doesn't talk about before. It's bad enough that sometimes he can't stop the loop of his mistakes from playing on repeat in his head. He racked up so many in rapid succession there. And, he wasn't given a choice in talking about the public ones. Or even worse, hearing other people talk it. 

"You don't have to. But if you want," Shitty says, pausing. "Talking is supposed to be good for you."

"Or so my therapist says," Jack says. Even that feels like an admission of failure, even though he knows, intellectually that it's not.

"Well, they'd have the fancy degree to know."

"I'm not convinced," Jack says. Shitty laughs. Shitty's idea of being funny himself is dirty jokes, but he gets always knows when to laugh at Jack's dry humor, and Jack laughs too. The ground under him is cold and damp, and he's got a best friend named Shitty, and the air is brisk like the first, refreshing breath of rink air in the melting heat of summer. 

"You could have just told me you like guys," Shitty says a trace of laughter still in his voice. "You didn't have to pretend to be in love with me. You're not, right?" Shitty pushes himself up to look at Jack.

"I'm not in love with you," Jack says. "I'm not. I don't." he pauses, awkward again. "It was just-" Parse "-him."

"Or both, whatever," Shitty says, waving a hand about indistinctly over Jack's head.

"No," Jack says looking away. "I mean, it's only ever been him." That's another confession and maybe there's something to the whole confessing your sins thing, because his next words spill out before he thinks them. "What if it's only ever him?" 

"That's okay too."

It's startling.

Jack isn't expecting that. Whenever things don't progress with some girl he isn't really into anyway, people always tell him he'll meet someone else. That there's someone out there for everyone. But Jack's never been convinced. He'd die for any one of his teammates, but Shitty hit the nail on the head. Jack doesn't want to sleep with any of them. He doesn't want to date them. He doesn't want to curl up with them at night and wake up with them the next morning. It's only ever been Parse with his challenging smirk and his soft hands, passing him a puck or trailing along his shoulders as he walked by.

"Jack, you'll be okay," Shitty says, putting a hand on Jack's shoulder. "And I'm not going anywhere. Best friends, right?"

Jack glances back a Shitty. "Yeah, sure," he says, shrugging off Shitty's hand.

"No," Shitty says, refusing to let go. "If you need me, I'm there. Serious."

Jack looks at Shitty. Shitty's as serious as Jack's ever seen him. "Okay." Jack pushes himself back up, so he's sitting and can look Shitty in the eye. 

"Yeah?" Shitty says.

"Yes." 

Jack runs a hand through his hair, shaking out a bunch of dirt. He pulls out a leaf and makes a face. If that doesn't break the moment, Shitty laughing at Jack's face certainly does.

"Oh, shut up, you're no better," Jack says.

Shitty shakes his head like a dog drying off, spraying bits of dirt and leaves everywhere. When he stops, there's one stubborn leaf stuck, and Jack leans over and picks it out of his hair.

"Let's go home," Shitty says standing up.

"But we've only covered my horribly embarrassing issues," Jack says. "We haven't gotten to talk about your ridiculous thing for Lardo yet." But he stands up too, even as he says it.

"Ugh," Shitty groans. "Does everyone know?"

"No, I think it's just me," Jack says. "Even though it's pretty obvious."

"Come one. I don't need to be in the woods for this. I can talk about this shit from your bed," Shitty says, taking the lead in walking back to the pavement.

"Not covered in dirt you won't," Jack says, eyeing the mud on Shitty's jeans. He's sure his own are just as bad, which doesn't bode well for his plan to put laundry off for another week.

"I'd be happy to take my clothes off," Shitty says. "You don't even need to ask."

"No. I'm the only person allowed in my bed without pants," Jack says. "Plus, it's past my bedtime."

"Hah. I knew it," Shitty crows. "But really, Lardo is just so swawesome, you know?" 

"Tell me," Jack says. And Jack listens to Shitty talk about how great Lardo is for the whole walk back.

**Author's Note:**

> This is what I did the for the last four hours. I'm posting now, because if I slept on it and reconsidered in the morning, I don't know that I'd feel comfortable putting this many feels out into the world. So many feels. 
> 
> Sophomore year, five people came out to Shitty in one week. What if Jack was one of them? How is a younger Shitty's response different? Basically, I just really love Shitty a lot.
> 
> And Jack. Jack and the [fairy tale of his tragic past](http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/post/57707902966).
> 
> I really wanted to pull a title from Shel Silverstein's [The Missing Piece](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT0wKeJQvGk), but "my own piece," sounds vaguely inappropriate. 
> 
> I've listed to [this fabulous Jack soundtrack](http://8tracks.com/cedesclaire/little-lion-man) several times while writing. And, as always, thanks to Ngozi for creating these wonderful characters.


End file.
